Con Ed lockout is still charged as talks go nowhere

U.W.U.A. Local 1-2 union members are still picketing outside Con Ed’s Irving Place headquarters. Photo by Ellen Moynihan

By Liza Béar | It’s been a busy two weeks for the locked-out Con Ed workers, with 24/7 rotating protests at the 4 Irving Place picket line and Uptown in front of C.E.O. Kevin Burke’s Upper East Side residence, plus a show of support from several thousand members of at least a dozen other unions in a solidarity labor rally at Union Square.

According to Gary Magliari, a U.W.U.A. (Utility Workers Union of America) Local 1-2 shop steward interviewed at the picket line, the lockout was due not to failed negotiations, as Con Ed claims, but was a deliberate act, a strategic move that was planned years in advance of the union’s contract that expired on July 1. Stripping away union benefits, Magliari charged, is part of Con Ed’s move toward consolidation prior to selling the company.

“What is going on in their meetings is an endless barrage of pie charts, statistics and PowerPoint presentations that describe Con Edison’s new world order,” Magliari said, quoting a source close to the talks. “It is absolutely surreal.”

On July 14, Local 1-2 texted an announcement from its president, Harry Farrell, that medical benefits had been reinstated retroactively for all 8,500 locked-out Con Ed employees. This has been the company’s only concession so far.

But pressure to end the lockout, believed by the union to be the largest in U.S. history, and to provide a fair contract is mounting both from the labor movement and public officials.

On Tues., July 17, union members and their supporters marched north from the picket line to 17th St. before turning west to Union Square’s north plaza, a historic site for labor rallies. Occupy Wall Street signs and banners were very much in evidence, as were many familiar faces from Zuccotti Park actions over the past months. And the language of corporate greed, income inequality and the “99 percent” made familiar by the Occupy movement pervaded almost every speech from union officials.

Among the unions present at the rally were the Communication Workers of America, Eftra, SAG, the Service Employees International Union, the Transport Workers Union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the United Federation of Teachers, the Steamfitters Union and the United Auto Workers, plus Occupy Wall Street.

“The most impressive show of strength I’ve seen from organized labor in a long time,” said Magliari about the rally. “The lockout has awakened a sleeping giant!”

Also onstage were local city and state officials, including Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Comptroller John Liu and Queens Councilmember James Sanders, whose recent letter to C.E.O. Burke accuses Con Ed of “reckless and irresponsible actions” and “refusal to negotiate in good faith with Local 1-2”.

Mike Langford, A.F.L.-C.I.O. president, led the roster of rousing speeches, punctuated by repeated chants of “We Are One.”

“There is an ill wind blowing across our country, and that wind reeks of the stench of corporate greed and the political expediency that allows corporate greed,” declared Chris Shelton, C.W.A. vice president, whose Verizon workers are still without a contract. “What they’re trying to do to my members at the bargaining table is much bigger than trying to steal your wages and your benefits. They’re stealing your democracy.”

The mood was one of unity and the emphasis was on New York’s place in the labor movement as a union town.

“We’ve been sitting at that table since April 12,” said Local 1-2 leader Farrell, addressing the crowd, “and since then nothing has changed. The only thing that they do is extend the period of time between breaks [in talks]. They don’t want to negotiate this contract.”

The union also filed a complaint with the Public Service Commission, charging that during the lockout, Con Ed has been failing to make regular inspections of manholes and transformers, creating a safety hazard.

As John Melia, Local 1-2 spokesperson, noted in an e-mailed statement, Con Ed’s response to the P.S.C. filing was self-contradictory, in that the utility company claimed it both needed the locked-out workers to maintain safety standards and that it could manage without them.

Negotiations resumed last Wed., July 18, the day after the rally, but there’s still “absolutely no progress in the talks,” according to Melia.

A Con Ed spokesperson said, “Our unionized employees are out of work because the union leadership has refused to agree to provide us with adequate notice of a strike. We cannot be in the midst of an emergency and have the union leadership call a sudden strike and leave. That would place us in a position of being unable to respond to customers and that’s not acceptable to us. If the union leadership would agree to provide us with adequate notice of a strike, the workers could return to their jobs.”

According to the spokesperson, Con Ed made three offers to the union leadership, all of which were refused. The former contract contained standard “no strike/no contract language,” meaning neither side could call a work stoppage, the spokesperson said.

“We are seeking a contract that balances the interests of our employees and customers,” he said. As to whether Con Ed was seeking to sell, he said, as with most public companies, he “couldn’t comment on such inquiries.”

On Wed., July 25, three committees of the state Assembly held a joint hearing on the Con Ed lockout to “examine the protocols in place to ensure the safety of employees and the public in this challenging situation.”

The hearing notice cited two nonfatal injuries to newly reassigned employees that occurred since Con Ed locked out 8,500 employees and replaced them with workers from management.

On Fri., July 20, there was a manhole and transformer fire on E. 14th St. between Broadway and Fourth Ave. around 1 p.m., a block away from Con Ed’s headquarters on Irving Place.

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